Self-Construal

Cultural Differences in Self

In describing the culture-specific nature of self, Markus and Kitayama suggest that cultural and social groups at any given time are associated with characteristic patterns of sociocultural participation, or, more specifically, with characteristic ways of being a person in the world. Each person is embedded within a variety of sociocultural contexts or cultures (e.g., country, ethnicity, religion, gender, family). Each of these cultural contexts makes some claim on the person and is associated with a set of ideas and practices (i.e., a cultural framework) about how to be a “good” person. Markus and Kitayama refer to these characteristic patterns of sociocultural participation as “self-ways.” Extending the notion of selfways, Markus and Kitayama delineate two general cultural self-schemata: independent and interdependent. These two images of self were originally conceptualized as reflecting the emphasis on connectedness and relations often found in non-Western cultures (“interdependent self”) and the separatedness and uniqueness of the individual (“independent self”) stressed in the West.

Whereas the self-system is the complete configuration of self-schemata (e.g., gender, race, religion, social class, and one's developmental history), the independent and interdependent construals of self are among the most general and overarching self-schemata of these in an individual's self-system. Based on an extensive review of cross-cultural literature, Markus and Kitayama argued that these two construals of self influence cognition, emotion, [Page 683]and motivation more powerfully than previously thought.

According to Markus and Kitayama, the main difference between the two self-construals is the belief one holds regarding how the self is related to others. In the independent construal, most representations of the self (i.e., the ways in which an individual thinks of himself or herself) have as their referent the individual's ability, characteristic, attribute, or goal (“I am friendly” or “I am ambitious”). These inner characteristics or traits are the primary regulators of behavior. This view of the self derives from a belief in the wholeness and uniqueness of each person's configuration of internal attributes. The normative imperative of such cultures is to become independent of others and to discover and express one's own unique attributes. Thus, the goals of persons in such cultures are to stand out and to express their own unique characteristics or traits. This orientation has led to an emphasis on the need to pursue personal self-actualization or self-development. Individual weakness, from this cultural perspective, is to be overly dependent on others or to be unassertive. This perspective is rooted in Western philosophical tradition. The ontological goal of this perspective is to highlight the division between the experiencer and what is experienced, in other words, to differentiate the individual from the context.

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